Maybe We Can Begin

When I was in college I read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being partially because it was the favorite book of some girl I wanted to impress and partially because it seemed like the kind of book the person I was trying to make myself into — erudite, deep-thinking, artistic — should be reading. It opens, as I recall, with the main character, Tomas, gazing longingly out of a window trying to decide between two paths. The problem, Kundera points out, is that this man has never taken either of these paths before. He does not know what will happen if he does either. So in the truest sense, he is faced with the fundamental weight of being alive, namely that he does not know what is going to happen, therefore he does not know what to do.

Lately whenever I talk to any one I love about “this moment,” as in the moment we are all in, the moment we are all sick of talking about, but that casts its shadow on everything, this weird dystopian upside down whatever it is as friend took to calling it at the beginning of pandemic (which I found and still find annoying) this moment which I’m tired of naming — but which I’m also more afraid that we’ll stop naming at all because then it will mean that these multiple collapses and public sufferings will have become entirely unremarkable — whenever I talk with a loved one about This Moment™, I find myself thinking about Tomas’s problem. How do you know where to go when you don’t know what will happen? It does seem more and more to be all of our core problem. What to do, what to do? The past few years have unleashed a torrent of doubt…